The Cost of Sentimentalizing War
Has the American myth of the Good War helped ensnare us in bad ones?
By Carlos Lozada
November 22, 2021
Boy running with toy airplane while explosion is in the background
“We search for a redemptive ending to every tragedy,” Elizabeth D. Samet writes.Illustration by Gérard DuBois
The terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, supposedly launched a new kind of American war, with unfamiliar foes, unlikely alliances, and unthinkable tactics. But the language deployed to interpret this conflict was decidedly old-school, the comfort food of martial rhetoric. With the Axis of Evil, the menace of Fascism (remixed as “Islamofascism”), and the Pearl Harbor references, the Second World War hovered over what would become known as the global war on terror, infusing it with righteousness. This latest war, President George W. Bush said, would have a scope and a stature evoking the American response to that other attack on the U.S. “one Sunday in 1941.” It wouldn’t be like Desert Storm, a conflict tightly bounded in time and space; instead, it was a call to global engagement and even to national greatness. “This generation will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future,” Bush avowed.
Elizabeth D. Samet finds such familiarity endlessly familiar. “Every American exercise of military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevitably measured against it,” she writes in “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A professor of English at West Point and the author of works on literature, leadership, and the military, Samet offers a cultural and literary counterpoint to the Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg industrial complex of Second World War remembrance, and something of a meditation on memory itself. It’s not simply that subsequent fights didn’t resemble the Second World War, she contends; it’s that the war itself does not resemble our manufactured memories of it, particularly the gushing accounts that enveloped its fiftieth anniversary. “The so-called greatness of the Greatest Generation is a fiction,” she argues, “suffused with nostalgia and with a need to return to some finest hour.” Those who forget the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who sentimentalize the past are rewarded with best-seller status.
Published in the print edition of the November 29, 2021, issue, with the headline “The Good Fight.”
Carlos Lozada, a book critic at the Washington Post, received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His first book, “What Were We Thinking,” was published in 2020.
December 19, 2021 @ 12:00 pm
I can relate to what is said here. There is a thought I’d like to share that I’ve never seen discussed in any academic manner, a thought I feel has a great deal of pertinence in regards to understanding how the United States now finds itself a society divided in a case of covert cultural civil warfare.
I grew up in the shadow of WW2… the good, the bad, and the ugly of the thing. It’s hard to think of any facet of America that was not influenced by that conflict. My father was a blooded veteran, Navy man in the Pacific whose ship (a minesweeper) was on the “picket line”, always on the leading edge of the fleet, always the Kamikaze’s first target attempting to open a path to the main fleet. Understanding his life (and the ptsd I’m sure was never diagnosed as such) was one of the initial factors that set me on the path to trying to understand what happened to the nation he defended.
Contemplate this statistic: if you were in the US military in WW2 you had approximately one chance in ten of facing the enemy in active combat. In those pre-corporate support days a high percentage of the remainder filled the support roles required to keep a modern army in the field. Easily understood.
What I’ve never seen spoken of was the social and emotional consequences of the over-run momentum of the wartime propaganda on the nine out of ten returning to civilian life. The consequences of heavy propaganda live on far beyond the propaganda campaigns themselves, and I maintain that fact actually began the crack in the American culture that has continued to widen to this very day.
Think of the nine. Everyone went away to war, everyone came home the conquering hero. Roll the dice on the nine… how many of them found themselves almost shamed by the fact they knew in their hearts the image did not fit them??? What did they do? They did what they’d been taught. We stay in ranks, we all dress the same, we all talk the same, no one need ever know. I give you the birth of the “establishment man” and the cultural onset of the need for deception, of self, of others. Fifteen, twenty years later these factors became the initial reason for the counterculture revolt of their children (my generation). Follow it forward from there and a great many things explain easily to such a bitter dichotomy attempting to heal.
The habits of war have this terrible habit of trying to find ways to remain active after the war that created them, they tend to try and defend their existence by any means available, which is where I’ll park my thought to link this (pre-amble) response back into the most excellent observations offered by Carlos Lozada.
If you’ve read this far I do thank you for the time of your thought, and thank you twice for any compassion you might have for the fate of the nine and the fate of the nation.